At the moment, the newest Linux kernel version for the Playstation 2 is 2.4.17, which can be downloaded from the Sony website. The reason why newer kernel versions aren't available is because the Playstation 2 toolchain is too old to build newer kernels (GCC 2.95.2 and Binutils 2.9). Some people at PS2Dev have ported GCC 3.2.2 and Binutils 2.14 to the Playstation 2, but isn't developed to run Linux (only static ELF's).

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At the moment, the newest Linux kernel version for the Playstation 2 is 2.4.17mvl21, which can be downloaded from the Sony website. The reason why newer kernel versions aren't available is because the Playstation 2 toolchain is too old to build newer kernels (GCC 2.95.2 and Binutils 2.9). Some people at PS2Dev have ported GCC 3.2.2 and Binutils 2.14 to the Playstation 2, but isn't developed to run Linux (only static ELF's).

New slim model has built-in ethernet, but is not able to store a harddisk

Running Linux on the Playstation 2

At the moment, the newest Linux kernel version for the Playstation 2 is 2.4.17mvl21, which can be downloaded from the Sony website. The reason why newer kernel versions aren't available is because the Playstation 2 toolchain is too old to build newer kernels (GCC 2.95.2 and Binutils 2.9). Some people at PS2Dev have ported GCC 3.2.2 and Binutils 2.14 to the Playstation 2, but isn't developed to run Linux (only static ELF's).

Bootloader

On the PS2 Linux does not run on the bare hardware but on an abstraction layer called RTE (Run Time Environment). The RTE was partly reimplemented as open source. The open source variant is called TGE (The Great Experiment).

The open source bootloader Kernelloader loads the required RTE/TGE modules before starting the Linux kernel. For 2.6 kernels it may also be possible to append the required RTE/TGE modules directly to the kernel image. On Kernelloader's project page there are some patches available for Linux 2.4.17 improving Linux compatibility especially with the newer slim PS2 models.